Textures

Taken at a friends wedding (not that of those mentioned), the effect is only slightly marred by the fact that I lent the cards against a pint of lager

In an attempt to not be quite such an old fuddy duddy all the time I have been experimenting of late with digital post processing of photos. Whilst the gold standard of photography will always be to get the picture as perfect as possible in camera, more often than not something somewhere will go slightly awry. Cue PhotoShop, Lightroom, Aperture or any other of a multitude of suites out there to help process and correct your shortcomings. I have PhotoShop Elements which is basically a stripped down version of the market-dominating behemoth that retains much of the functionality of it's big brother but at about a fifth of the price.

This is one of my favourite shots from my trip to Porto. The old terracotta roofs really lend themselves to the ageing process

As I read about, practice and learn more about photography the more it seems to be the case that pretty much everyone fiddles with their pics to some degree. Those that literally never make any adjustments seem to be regarded as almost puritanical, looked on slightly askance as if they're some sort of idiot savant - brilliant, but slightly odd, and not in a good way. They're bracketed away with those people who will spend two days travelling to a location but always restrict themselves to just one perfect exposure which they'll spend literally all day composing. These people produce superb work but normal people shouldn't, couldn't, be expected to be the same way. 

Another thing that learning more about photography has done is give me the ability to spot more and more modifications in photos wherever I see them be it at bus stops, galleries or in books of fine art photography. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet. On the one hand it can provide inspiration and ideas about new techniques that I might be able to put into practice, but on the other hand an image that previously would have just made me say, "Wow", can now occasionally have me thinking the equivalent of, "I can see the strings". On balance it's probably a good thing. The line between too much modification and just right is entirely subjective. The full spectrum can be seen from fine art puritans at one end to fashion magazines, that seem to deal in works of complete fiction, at the other.

This is the first texture I ever attempted. I was trying to make it look like an old photo that had been printed and mistreated over many years

And so it is that I have decided to play around with these things; obviously the examples here are in no way subtle, this is more than a simple Levels or Curves adjustment. I've deliberately given them all a very aged and antiqued feel; the affect is achieved by blending in a texture layer and the addition of a little vignetting. Different textures will obviously have different effects, and not all photos will lend themselves to such modification so the selection of the two layers you're going to combine is quite important. 


Before I tell you how to go about creating these sorts of photos I'd better let you know where you can get some textures. Luckily, there are lots of very nice people out there who let you have them for free. Go to Flickr and search for 'free textures', this should throw up plenty of results. There are literally hundreds if not thousands  of them there but do please make sure that they are available for use. Check to see if there is a Creative Commons license for the image and if the creator has any conditions of use. Often they will just request a courtesy thank you or a link back to the original texture or something along those lines. There are also good websites dedicated solely to such things like CG Textures. Sometimes you will find that a good photo and a good texture won't necessarily go together; the colours and tones involved and the type of effect you're trying to achieve will all need to be considered in selecting both your starting image and the texture you want to combine it with.

From Vietnam, the old skool bike and conical hat add to the sense of times past

I'm going to end with a quick description of how to go about blending the texture layer into the image you've selected. Unless you own Elements or PhotoShop and intend to actually do this you can probably stop reading and carry on with your life. For the rest of you: sit up straight and pay attention, I won't tolerate slacking. Fortunately, this is actually all quite easy; instructions are for PhotoShop Elements although I'd imagine it's pretty similar for the grown up version. Here's how:

- First up, import your two images into the Elements Organiser and then into the Workspace ready for editing.

- You need your two images to be the same size so go to your photo and click Image>Resize>Image Size. Make a note of the pixel height and width of your image and then go to your texture, follow the same command path and enter in the figures. Make sure you have Resample Image ticked. Your texture will now be stretched or shrunk to the same size as your photo.

- On your texture click Select>All and then press Ctrl+C, go back to your photo and press Ctrl+V. The texture will now appear over the top of your photo as a new Layer.

- It's not really necessary but if you like you can rename the layer to distinguish it from others you might use later by right clicking on the layer in the Layers box on the right hand side and selecting Rename Layer.

- As things stand the texture layer is completely opaque so now we begin the blending process. Making sure you have your texture layer selected on the right hand side (as opposed to Background) simply click the drop down box where it says Normal and select one of the myriad blending options.

- Pick any you like but the most useful will likely be Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light. Once you have one you like you can also modify the percentage opacity by clicking the drop down box.

- The texture you have selected may have a vignette already in it but if not then adding one in can really contribute to the sense of it being an old photo. To do this select the Background layer and then click Filter>Correct Camera Distortion. This tool is normally used to remove vignettes but in this case we're going to use it to add one in.

- On the right just move the sliders for Amount and Midpoint around until you achieve the effect you're after. You should be careful at this point as this alteration is a permanent one that affects the background of your image. Unless you're certain of what you're doing it is prudent to save a copy beforehand so that you can always go back to it if you mess things up. This is a good tip just in general for when you are playing about with your images.

- For some reason this renames the Background layer as Layer 0. You can either ignore this or rename it again.

That pretty much does it. If you like you can add in a standard Curves or Levels layer to lighten/darken the general palette of the image. Save the image as either a TIFF file or PhotoShop file to preserve all the layers in case you ever want to go back to them later on. You should also save all new images as a JPEG in case you ever want to e-mail them or upload them somewhere, like to an exciting blog that you write.

And that's that; give it a try and let me know how you get on. As I wrote those steps I made a new image to make sure I didn't miss anything out; the texture is most clear in the previously light blue sky and I've applied a pretty heavy vignette to the corners to demonstrate the effect. Here it is:

Ta dah!

The Lea Valley

The ArcelorMittal orbit

Over the past 6 months or so as I walk to work I've been able to watch a strange structure slowly rise up out of the ground on the Olympic site. Now, I'm no fan of the Olympics but I do like interesting architecture and, living just a few hundred yards from one edge of the site, I've been able to watch a lot of building work in the last 5 years. Aside from the stadium and other main venues there have been bridges built, canals dredged, roads widened, stations redeveloped and railway track laid; being a bit of a geek I really enjoy watching these sorts of things develop as I walk or ride by. I like to watch the process, stage by stage, note the sequences, watch the people and observe how order is slowly borne out of seeming chaos. It was a treat then to see something so unusual as the Orbit emerge so close by.

This image is a panorama of three photos stitched together. Click on it to panorama-fy it up a bit

The Olympic site, which will be known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park once all is done and dusted, is situated in the east end of London on what was largely an industrial area in years gone by. From my point of view the main item in favour of the Olympics has always been the redevelopment of this land into what should eventually be a pleasant and green space, which is always good. Criss crossing the whole site is the river Lea and the associated canals that used to supply the industry of past. Linking this area to other patches of more natural looking life is a route known as the Greenway. This stretches from the Royal docks further south on the Isle of Dogs (not only is this no longer an island but no one seems to be quite sure anymore as to the dog reference either) up through West Ham and Plaistow into Stratford, where I live, and on into Hackney. It's a sort of ribbon of green that picks it's way through the city and, as you walk along it, if you don't look too closely and avoid the horizon you can almost fool yourself that you're taking a turn through the countryside. Almost. Maybe a small town.

This looks more like the nice end of my home town than the edge of Europe's biggest building site

The route is almost entirely raised up on a large bank that gives away it's heritage upon closer inspection: it's a sewer. But not just any sewer. The Great Stink of 1858 and the cholera outbreaks of the same decade were what instigated legendary Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette to construct London's famous sewerage works. The Greenway rides atop the Northern Outfall Sewer which is responsible for taking all of north London's waste down to the Thames at Beckton. At the time it still wasn't common knowledge that cholera was caused by a bacterium, the sewers were built solely to remove the stink which happened to result in the water quality improving which got rid of the cholera.

Okay, I can feel myself getting over excited now so I'm going to stop talking about sewers. The point is that there are thin veins of greenery threading their way through what is normally considered a pretty grim part of the city and they're really quite nice. They are also currently the closest you are allowed to get to the newer building work (barring special events) passing within just a couple of hundred yards of the new stadium - near enough to hear builders guffawing with laughter when something large and expensive sounding got dropped.

I exposed for about 1/3 second to get the blurring effect on the water

So, for more than five years I had been living in the Lea Valley and completely ignoring it. This has clearly been a mistake. As my wife and I left the Greenway and started following the canal around the north of the Olympic site we managed to forget that we were right on top of a vast construction site. With the stadium and Orbit out of view behind us we were just left with one and two storey residential buildings, the tranquillity of the slow moving water and the ducks and swans that made it their home.

Even the water ways here that look natural have been heavily modified by man's hand. The river has been 'canalised'; which basically means it's been levelled off, made a bit straighter and generally made more navigable. Whilst on the walk I spotted that some signs said Lee and others Lea with no apparent rhyme or reason. Investigations revealed, though, that the parts that are still fairly untouched are still called Lea, whereas man-made sections and modifications are distinguished by being called Lee. Neat.

One of the great things about canals, asides from their history and functionality, is that they tend to be rather still; combine that with a windless day, like we had, and that means you can get some very nice reflections in the water. The above shot was at a sort of T-junction that was more open than most areas and therefore the water was more disturbed but I still loved the reflection from this construction site.


Another reason why I enjoyed this little excursion so much was that it was an opportunity to get out with my new camera. I bought a Sony A65 in the January sales and am very impressed with it so far. I wasn't sure at first as it's an SLT camera, not an SLR, but it has more than held it's own and is definitely opening up some new avenues for me. I won't go into any more detail here, I'll probably give it it's own post in the near future and clearly label it as a techy sort of post so that those not interested in geeky detail can skip over it. I'll be doing the same with a post on digitally incorporating textures into images at some point too.

The old canal with traditional barges moored and the 'Gherkin' rising up on the horizon

A couple of hours of walking took us two thirds of the way around the Olympic site and from there we got the train home. I suspect I shall be spending a lot more time walking along these canals this year. I think a wander down to the Royal Docks on the Greenway wouldn't go amiss either. Home just got a little bit nicer.

Arriba!

You may find that a few months from now I start a series of posts about the joys of travelling from Cancun through the Yucatan peninsula and up to Mexico City. Exciting times.

Portrait of Vietnam

Time for another post on Vietnam I think. For the bulk of this post I'm going to try to relate an encounter I had with a young man I met in the town of Da Lat towards the south of Vietnam. The pictures will all be of my attempts, with varying degrees of success, at taking photos of actual human beings.

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Before I set off to Vietnam I was determined to have a go at getting some portrait work done. It isn't something that comes naturally to me as I'm not much of a people person and I tend to get a bit shy about asking strangers if it's okay for me to pap them. Also, the second you ask if you can take someone's photo they often stop doing the very thing that made you want to take a photo of them in the first place. With this in mind I took a mixed approach; sometimes I would ask permission, often providing a monetary incentive, and at other times I would surreptitiously snap on the sly for a more natural look.

This lady seemed to just be chilling out during the scorching midday heat in Hoi An

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He didn't ask me not to use his real name, and perhaps it's an unnecessary precaution, but the conversation I had with a young man that I'm going to call Tuan (a common Vietnamese name) was probably not one he would want broadcast around the world. It's unlikely that his comments would ever be traced back to him but discretion is the better part of valour.

I met Tuan in the mountain town of Da Lat; his job was to cover the reception of the hostel we were in for the night shift which appeared to run 7pm-7am. We had arrived into Da Lat later than we had anticipated as our overnight train from Da Nang hadn't set off til one in the morning and then we had to get a bus ride of several hours duration up into the mountains. Once we arrived we were a pretty ragged looking bunch who just wanted a shower and some clean clothes.

This little boy and his mother were trying to sell bananas and water to passing tourists at the floating market in Ben Tre

It was Tuan's job to collect our passports and take down our details. This wasn't unusual, everywhere we had stayed up until this point had taken our passports, but they had either just taken a quick copy or kept them for an hour or two and then returned them. Tuan wanted to keep them permanently in the hotel safe. This was not deemed acceptable by some members of our party and so I was tasked with their liberation. I explained the situation to Tuan but he couldn't quite fathom it, he couldn't see why we had a problem and, judging by the massive stack of passports he had, most guests did not have a problem with this. After going in circles for a while he finally told me why he had to keep hold of them; each day, at about half past seven, he would take the passports of all the guests in the hostel that day to the local police station and give the details to the authorities. Again, this didn't feel particularly unusual, I presumed this is what had been happening our whole trip, except that everyone else had been happy with copies. A quick conflab with the girls and it was decided that we didn't want our passports going on an excursion without us and so I went back to Tuan to try to find a mutually agreeable resolution. After much circular debate, and to the incredulity of Tuan, I decided I was going to go with him to the police station.

This is the son of the tailor in Hoi An that I mentioned in a previous post. He was shy initially, hanging back and playing with his mothers measuring stick.

Da Lat, being in the mountains, had a climate similar to Britain at that time and so it was that the two of us set off into the cold, dark, rainy night and begain to chat about things other than the administrative burden of a hostel. It turned out to be about a 15 minute walk each way which gave us plenty of time to exchange stories. He started, which I often find to be the case in these sorts of situations, by asking about the Queen and how it is she goes about ruling our country. This led to an impromptu tutorial on the current coalition Government that we have; not an easy task under any circumstance. Once we'd built a bit of rapport I decided to give him a bit of a grilling on what life is like in a one party Communist state. Did he feel free? Did he want to vote? Is life good? Would he like to see change? It should come as no surprise that he wasn't very positive about the Government. He talked about how anyone who wanted to build themselves a house had to not just go through the convoluted official channels, but also to pay the appropriate bribes. These are particularly extortionate if you're not a member of the Communist Party. Far from membership being compulsory, as in many one party states, there are actually lots of people who are not allowed into the Party: anyone with a history of dissidence, either personally or in their family, anyone that has links to America, and anyone that is too overtly religious, especially Catholics (although traditionally inclined to Buddhism and Taoism, most Vietnamese would call themselves atheists).

Over time he stopped shying away and started behaving more naturally.

At this point we had arrived at the police station where Tuan dutifully joined the back of a small queue of similar looking young men, all with a little bundle of passports. Inside there was one rather corpulent and surly looking officer who was mostly watching what appeared to be the Vietnamese version of East Enders. He alternated between completely ignoring the young lads and suddenly barking something unpleasant sounding at them. The boys all took it in turns to sit at a rickety, old desk and enter the details of their guests into a large, old ledger of the type you would imagine went out of fashion in Victorian times. Although the amassed boys may have known one another no one spoke. The station had a severe and unfriendly air, the boys did not want to be here, they didn't want to have to do this; previous experience implied that it was wholly unnecessary, I suspect that it was merely the whim of this particularly objectionable police officer. When Tuan's turn came around he appeared to offer a few words of explanation as to my presence as I was rather sticking out; the officer gave a sort of snarl and turned back to his soap opera. He didn't look at me.

This lady was sculling her way through the floating market of Ben Tre in the Mekong

As we returned to the hostel Tuan began to talk more effusively. He clearly didn't like the local police. It is the police that insist on the bribes so that new house builds go smoothly. He talked of how dangerous the town was because the police didn't go out at night. The police get paid a lot to do very little, so long as local criminals don't involve the tourists then they are pretty much left alone. He told me of the time that a woman who had just been assaulted by her husband came running into the police station for protection only to be ordered to return to her husband and apologise to him. Officers are given big houses very cheaply and can afford to send their children to school and care for ill family members. It would seem there are definitely advantages to being on the inside.

This man is playing the traditional dan nguyet, or moon lute; essentially a 2 string guitar that sounds like this

During our earlier negotiations I had felt guilty for not trusting Tuan and our short journey together had revealed him to be a bright, honest young man who was just trying to not piss off a guy who could probably make his life very difficult for him. I talked to him a few more times over the couple of days we were in Da Lat and always found him to be very interesting and informative. One time when we had an internet connection to hand we looked at maps of each others countries and discussed our homes more; we talked about the Arab Spring and how China was once again trying to bully and intimidate Vietnam. He spoke bitterly of the Chinese. Like many of us, although Tuan disliked the people in charge he was clearly very fond of his country, it's landscape and it's people; and rightly so. He was full of suggestions of places for us to go in the south of his country even though he himself had never had the chance to visit most of them. Tuan was just one of several people that I met in Vietnam that have really stuck in my memory. Generally I keep to myself both at home and abroad; I'm not a talker - not when sober. But one thing I do love is being able to get a first hand perspective on situations I could otherwise never really understand. After spending one fast paced holiday in Vietnam I would claim no special insight into the country's workings but, when talking to Tuan and people like him, for a few short minutes, I got it.

As we arrived back at the hostel from our little trip to the station I asked Tuan, given all the monetary benefits in such a tough environment, if most young men aspired to be police officers. "No," he said, "we'd rather be poor."

This lady was having a slow day in Vinh Long market in the Mekong delta